Wednesday, November 28, 2012

What if it hadn’t been a cliff that Ben Bernanke
conjured up last February?

The Federal Reserve chairman used the phrase “fiscal
cliff” to describe the drastic effects on the economy of automatic tax increases
and spending cuts that will take place after Jan. 1, if Congress and the White
House fail to agree on a deficit reduction plan.

He could have said, as some liberal Democrats do
now, fiscal slope or curve or hill. Progressives hope downplaying the danger of
the cliff will give President Barack Obama more spine in negotiating with the
Republicans.

Bernanke’s use of cliff in testimony on Capitol Hill
seemed fresh, but it was a 1970s retread.

Ben Zimmer, the language columnist for the Boston
Globe, tracked fiscal cliff to a Dallas Morning News editorial on June 16,
1975: "Who hasn't looked with horror at New
York City's financial plight? The nation's biggest, richest city is about to go
over the fiscal cliff if the state and federal governments don't lend a helping
hand."

Zimmer
found other newspaper writers had climbed the fiscal cliff in the 1980s to
describe their local budget battles.

With his visit to the cliff, Bernanke endowed with
horror the prospect that Washington again will fail to deal with the nation’s
economic problems. Naturally, the phrase caught on. It’s our own Mayan end of
the world.

Nobody imagined we’d still be staring
into the canyon nine months later.

Calling it a curve instead of a cliff might not make
reaching compromise in Washington any easier, but a more benign metaphor might prevent
a sense of rising panic in some Americans.

The stock markets are nervous, and some people reportedly
were so anxious about the looming consequences of cliff diving -- recession and
unemployment over 9 percent – that they stayed home on Black Friday. Friends, that is no way to jumpstart the economy.

For many of us, fiscal cliff evokes the last scene
in the movie “Thelma and Louise,” only now, 21 years later, we’re in the back seat
of the Thunderbird, about to sail into the abyss.

We stand by helplessly as talking heads say that the
president and the House speaker again today did not meet face to face. The
countdown continues to cliffageddon.

The fiscal cliff is
the latest in a series of cinematic terms with political impact. Ronald Reagan
brought us welfare queens, Barack Obama the bitter people clinging to their
guns and religion, and Mitt Romney the 47 percent on the dole who see themselves
as victims.

It’s possible the fiscal cliff won’t disappear with
the New Year’s confetti. The president and Congress could do just enough to get
us through the crisis and resume negotiations on the debt ceiling and tax and
entitlement reforms next year.

Speaking of entitlement reform, Republicans say
Democrats must embrace cuts in safety net programs to reach a budget deal. Only
a few months ago, though, the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee urged
GOP candidates to steer away from the very words entitlement reform.

The goal was to distance Republican candidates from
some of Ryan’s “reforms” of Social Security and Medicare, which were unpopular
with older voters.

This week, Drew Altman, head of the Kaiser Family
Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank on health policy issues, suggested that news
organizations resist using the phrase entitlement reform, even though
politicians do.

The phrase makes any changes in Medicare and
Medicaid that Democrats and Republicans agree on “sound more palatable and
forward thinking,” Altman wrote on his blog.

Altman, a former welfare commissioner of New Jersey
who worked on state and national welfare reform, said he’d been pleased years
ago when reporters wrote of “welfare reform.”

“Welfare ‘overhaul’ would have been a much more
neutral description but I admit that when I was selling my welfare reform
program…I was more than happy for the media call it reform,” he wrote.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

For
most of the last century, no more than two women served at the same time in the
U.S. Senate.

In
the 1980s, women House members were not allowed in the House gym.

After
the 1992 election, headline writers broke out the phrase Year of the Woman to
describe the vast crowd of women coming to the Senate – six. The phrase annoyed
at least one senator.

“Calling 1992 the Year of the Woman makes it
sound like the Year of the Caribou or the Year of the Asparagus,” Sen. Barbara
Mikulski, D-Md., complained at the time. “We’re not a fad, a fancy, or a year.”

Women
weren’t a fad, but they’re still a distinct minority in Congress. In January, 20
women will serve in the Senate, 16 Democrats and four Republicans. One in five
-- that’s the most women ever in the Senate.

In
the House, there will be a record 78 women, about 18 percent of the members.
Fifty-eight are Democrats, 20 Republicans. At least three of the new women in
the House are in their 30s.

For
the first time, women and minorities will outnumber white men among Democrats
in the House. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., celebrated the Democratic
caucus milestone, saying it would be “the first caucus in the history of
civilized government to have a majority of women and minorities.”

That’s
impressive, but it’s unclear how having more women and minorities in Congress
will affect policy. Republicans still control the House, and the Republican
caucus is dominated by white men. Their goal is to shrink the size of
government and cut entitlements.

In earlier times, women in Congress worked to avoid
being pigeon-holed as interested in “women’s” issues. In fact, when the Women’s
Caucus was formed in the House in 1977, “it met with considerable resistance
even among women members,” according to a history on the House clerk’s Web
page.

Political
scientists who have studied women in elective office are divided on whether
women have different legislative priorities than men. While some studies find women more likely to support certain family and
workplace issues, other studies find no trend.

For one thing, there’s
been a blurring of what women’s issues are. Plus, family-work balance, pay
equity, education and health care mean different things to different people, whether
men or women. Someone’s political party can be more predictive of his or her
stand than gender.

While
some Republican women in Congress supported certain benefits in the health care
overhaul -- such as not allowing health insurance companies to charge women
higher premiums than men -- not one Republican, man or woman, voted for final
passage of the Affordable Care Act.

“Based
on my experience, just because you’re an elected official and a woman, that
doesn’t mean you’re going to vote” for women’s issues, Rep. Rep. Rosa DeLauro,
D-Conn., says in Madeleine M. Kunin’s “The New Feminist Agenda,” published in
April.

As
the title suggests, Kunin, who was the first woman governor of Vermont and served
as ambassador to Switzerland, is calling for another social revolution ‘’not
for the benefit of women alone,” she says, “but for the sake of the
family.”

She
argues that while women have made great progress in the workplace, the country needs
social policies that support families. The United States is the only country in
the developed world that fails to offer paid maternity leave or paid sick
leave.

A
poll of international gender specialists in June ranked the United States the
sixth-best country for women -- behind Canada, Germany, Britain, Australia and France. In France, new mothers get 16 weeks of maternity
leave at full pay.

The
panel, which looked at the G20 developed countries, cited poor access to health
care and the debate over reproductive rights for the U.S. rank, the poll by
TrustLaw, a legal news service run by Thompson Reuters Foundation, reported.

We’re
No. 6? That doesn’t sound right. It’s time for women and men in Congress to
support working parents and stand up for families.

No
worries about the Year of the Woman or asparagus. Call it the Year of All of
Us.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Psychologists reject the popular definition of insanity
as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Insanity
is just a legal term, they say.

Fine, but they should hang around the nation’s
capital. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to see we’re living in a nutty time.

We just endured a $6 billion election – the costliest
in American history – that failed to reset Washington. For the last two years,
as gridlock reigned, people kept saying “after the election, after the election...”

Finally the election came and went and we still have
the same key players in the White House and Congress. We hear talk of
compromise, but at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue the players seem to be
digging in their heels, saying many of the same things about the same looming
problems as they did before voters went to the polls.

One big difference now: Time is running out to fix a
fiscal crisis that could plunge the country back into recession and bring
misery to millions. Unless President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans
agree soon on a deficit reduction plan, a package of $500 billion in tax increases
and spending cuts will kick in automatically in early January.

Obama is sticking to his campaign pledge to raise
the income tax rates on the top 2 percent of individuals and top 3 percent of
businesses. That’s what the election was about, he says, and he won. He’s
right.

Election Day exit polls found that 47 percent of
voters approved of raising taxes on people with incomes above $250,000, as
Obama proposes, the Associated Press reported. Only 35 percent wanted no tax
increases for anyone and 13 percent favored higher taxes for all.

There was a glimmer of rationality after Obama’s first
post-election news conference. The president seemed open to a smaller increase
in tax rates on high incomes than he had called for previously. Boehner seemed
to suggest the possibility of a deal, but other Republicans were dismissive. We’ve
been down this road before, when Obama and Boehner failed to agree on a “grand
bargain” last year.

Speaking of insanity, almost every Republican member
of Congress has signed the no-new-taxes pledge championed by Grover Norquist,
founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform.

“The problem is too much spending,” Norquist declared
on CBS the other day. “The problem is not that the peasants aren’t sending
enough money to Washington.

But it’s not the peasants who would send in more
money; it’s the princes.

Anyone who would like to see
Washington work for a change hopes that Norquist’s influence is waning. But Americans
for Tax Reform just poured nearly $16 million into the general election
campaign, according to an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation.

The Taxpayer
Protection Pledge obliges signers to oppose any effort to increase marginal tax
rates or to reduce tax deductions and credits, unless matched dollar-for-dollar
by further reducing tax rates.

I’d like to say that Americans trust Obama and
Congress to do their jobs and steer the country away from the fiscal cliff. Alas,
no.

About half of us expect that the two sides will not
reach agreement, and only 38 percent think they will, a post-election survey by
Pew Research-Washington Post found.

The poll shows how little faith people have that
Washington can function. Still, failing to reach a deal could prove risky to
Republicans’ political health. Asked who would be to blame if no deal is
reached, 53 percent said congressional Republicans and only 29 percent said
Obama.

Congress and the president need to do their jobs. Anything
less is insanity.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

As another election goes into the history books, let’s agree
on three things: No one should have to stand in line for hours to cast a ballot,
voting machines should work and election officials should be competent.

But if it’s election-bashing you want, you won’t find it
here. Today, this space is devoted to praising the heroes of American elections:
the poll workers. These volunteers make up a grassroots army in service to
democracy. They work long hours for minimal pay.

We owe poll workers gratitude, not blame, even when the
system doesn’t work the way it should. Localities need to buy reliable voting machines
and provide quality training to poll workers. State legislators should consider
the real-world effects of complicated voting laws and encourage early and
no-excuses absentee voting.

I’ve spent many an Election Day outside polling places,
asking people for whom they voted and why, but this time I wanted to see an
election from the inside. I applied to be an election officer, or poll worker,
in Alexandria, Va. Poll workers are city
or county employees for the day and are apolitical on Election Day; they’re
different from poll watchers who represent the political parties and
candidates.

After filling out a sheaf of application papers, I got
called for training. I spent about three and a half hours at in-person and online
training. At the unholy hour of 4:45 am. on Election Day, I reported for duty, coffee
thermos in hand, at Precinct 102 in City Hall.

Virginia poll workers stay at the polling place for the
duration – they may not leave the premises until the election is over and all reports
have been completed and signed. Over the next 15-plus hours, my job included monitoring
the check-in line to keep it moving smoothly, greeting voters and giving them
information about the ballot process, and checking voters’ IDs.

People worried that Virginia’s
new voter ID law might cause problems, and reportedly it did elsewhere. But no
voters showed up at our precinct without an ID.

Chief Election
Officer Jeff Herre, calm and collected, set the day’s tone. Only a few of the
18 workers were first-timers. Herre administered the oath of office, called us
a team and urged us to help each other. My fellow election workers were smart,
courteous, efficient and kind – and they had fun.

Alexandria had returned to paper ballots, but there were no hanging,
dimpled or pregnant chads. Voters marked ballots with pens provided in the
voting stations and fed their ballots into a scanner.

One of our two scanners malfunctioned, causing a slowdown
until an IT person made repairs. An initial rush when the polls opened at 6
a.m. resulted in a line that snaked around the corner, and some voters reported
waiting half an hour in the cold. After that, though, there were no long lines.

But some voters’ names weren’t in the computer poll book and
they had to see Herre or his assistant to find their correct polling place or fill
out address or name-change forms.

At times, half a dozen voters and election officers stood in
line, waiting for Herre to solve their problems, but Herre, 66, a retired CIA
analyst, never lost his cool or raised his voice.

I spent part of the day at the door with Deborah Cureton, a
retired government auditor and veteran poll worker. Cureton enjoys seeing neighbors
and meeting new ones, and when the precinct’s election results finally print
out, “you know where you fit in the whole event of worldwide importance,” she
said.

Of the roughly 118 million votes cast in the 2012
presidential election, 1,481 came from Precinct 102 Tuesday and 752 absentee ballots were cast
earlier.

Around the country, poll workers in 176,000 precincts see
elections from the grassroots. The largest group of poll workers is between 61 and
70 years old, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Efforts to recruit younger workers and college
students are ongoing.

As a student, Chris Kurowski, 36, helped his mother, an
election official in Newport News, Va.

“Elections are a social event; they’re like a reunion,” he
said, recalling home-made casseroles and desserts poll workers there
shared. Kurowski worked his first
Alexandria election mostly outside, even dog-sitting while pets’ owners voted.

Nobody gets rich working the polls. Localities set the rate
of pay, and in Alexandria election officers receive $100 and the chiefs, who
also must pick up and deliver equipment, $200.

So, next time you go to vote, don’t forget to thank the poll
workers who make it happen.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Every four years, Americans are confronted with the
Electoral College, a vestige of the 18th century that still stalks
our elections. Test yourself on the
Electoral College and why it matters with our 10-question quiz. Good luck,
no peeking at the answers below, and may the best person win – without
recounts.

QUESTIONS

1. On a presidential Election Day, voters elect:

A. The next president and vice president, stupid

B. Members of
Congress and federal officials who actually elect the president and VP

C. People other
than in Congress and federal office who elect the president and VP

D. People legally
bound to vote each state’s popular vote

2. True or False:
“Electoral College” appears in the Constitution.

3. What’s the Electoral College got to do with the Holy Roman
Empire?

A. Nothing. Are you kidding?

B. The founders borrowed the election concept from the
Holy Roman Empire

C. The term “college” comes from the Latin “collegium,” a
group that acts as a unit, as in the college of cardinals

D. Both B and C

4. Where is the
Electoral College?

A. New York City

B. Washington

C. Philadelphia

D. None of the above

5. There are 435 members of the House of Representatives
and 100 senators. How many electors are in the Electoral College?

A. 100

B. 435

C. 535

D. 538

6. True or False: A presidential election is over when a presidential
candidate makes a concession speech.

7. It takes a
majority of electoral votes – 270 -- to win the White House. What happens if no
candidate gets a majority?

A. The Senate elects the president

B. The House of Representatives elects the president

C. The Supreme Court elects the president

D. The 50 governors elect the president

8. How often has the winner of the nationwide popular
vote for president not won the electoral vote?

A. Four times

B. Twice

C. Once

D. Never

9. Who administers the Electoral College process?

A. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

B. U.S Department of Justice

C. Office of the Federal Register at the National
Archives

D. None of the above

10. True or False. There have been more proposals for constitutional
amendments to change the Electoral College than on any other subject.

Bonus Question: What happens on Dec. 17?

ANSWERS

1. C. The Electoral
College, not the nationwide popular vote, determines who wins the election. The
Constitution prohibits U.S. senators, representatives and anyone holding “an Office
of Trust or Profit under the United States” from being electors. Neither the
Constitution nor federal law requires electors to follow the popular vote; many
states have such laws, but not all.

2. False. “Electors”
appears in Article II and the 12th Amendment. But “electoral
college” is not in the Constitution. The term
came into use in the early 19th century and now is in federal law.

3. D. The founders were well educated.

4. D. Electoral
College is a process, not a place. There’s no campus, no football team, no
cheerleaders.

5. D. Each state’s electors equal the number of its U.S.
House members and senators for a total of 535. The District of Columbia is
treated as a state and gets three electors, thanks to the 23rd
Amendment.

6. False. A
concession speech has no bearing on the Electoral College process.

7. B. Each state’s House delegation gets one vote. The Senate elects the vice president, with each senator
getting one vote.

8. A. In 1824, 1876,
1888 and 2000.

9. C. The office also provides the official text of all federal laws
and presidential documents and runs the constitutional amendment
process.

10. True. More than 700 proposals have been introduced in
Congress to reform or eliminate the Electoral College.

Bonus Question: That’s the day electors meet in the states
to elect the president and VP.

SCORING: 10 points
for each correct answer, plus 5 points for bonus.

85 to 100 -- Congratulations, you win the Electoral College
bowl!

70 to 85 – Professor, tenure at the Electoral College is yours.

55 to 70 – Learned scholar, go to the head of the class.

55 to 70 – Politicians crave numbers like these.

40 to 55 – Your insight is blog-worthy.

25 to 40 -- Keep tweeting. Rome and the Electoral College weren’t
built in a day.

Below 25 – There’s always 2016.

SOURCES:

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, briefing
by Thomas Neale of Congressional Research Service at Washington Foreign Press
Center, http://fpc.state.gov/199412.htm,
the New York Times, “The Framing of the Constitution” by Max Ferrand.